Who learns from whom? Supporting users and developers of a major biodiversity e-infrastructure

Abstract

Support systems play an important role for the communication between users and developers of software. We studied two support systems, an issues tracker and an email service available for Scratchpads, a Web 2.0 social networking tool that enables communities to build, share, manage and publish biodiversity information on the Web. Our aim was to identify co-learning opportunities between users and developers of the Scratchpad system by asking which support system was used by whom and for what type of questions. Our results show that issues tracker and emails cater to different user mentalities as well as different kind of questions and suggest ways to improve the support system as part of the development under the EU funded ViBRANT programme.

Scratchpads 2.0: a Virtual Research Environment supporting scholarly collaboration, communication and data publication in biodiversity science

“…The Scratchpads have employed a variety of mechanisms over the past five years to support users (see Brake et al, this volume for a full review). Despite these advances, providing adequate support to a rapidly growing number of users remains an ongoing challenge.…”

“…Throughout 2011 an extensive survey has been undertaken to further identify how the needs of users can be better supported. Full details of this are available in Brake et al (2011) published in this volume.…”